Weight Loss
I don't know how much I've really talked about this, but it is something I've been spending a lot of time dwelling on. When I had Katie, I ended up 17 pounds below the weight I'd started out. I've slowly gained that back over the last year and a half, plus a couple extra, putting me at the heaviest I've ever been, including my weight at the peak of my pregnancy. There is no wiggle room for me to say I have a large frame or flab on top of muscle or that I look good with padding on my curves. I don't.
I'm not only overweight (obese for my height), I'm horribly unfit. And though it hasn't seemed to have adversely affected my health, I know it is only a matter of time, especially if I continue to gain 5 or 10 pounds each year. I can not continue this way. I know most of the decrease in Bobby's and my sex life is due to how I feel about my body, something I'm not at all comfortable discussing with him.
Last year, watching TV a little extra early I caught an infomercial for P90X, a rigorous exercise routine designed to get people in the best shape they've ever been in. I bought it, and watched videos of people making incredible changes on youtube and got myself very pumped up. I was doing well, but 3 weeks into the program, I broke my foot in a feat of clumsiness that surprises even me.
In the time it took me to heal, I weaned Katie and she started walking, two things that dramatically changed the structure and nature of our days. When I started P90X, I did my routines in the morning. I'd give Katie a snack and close her off in an area separate from me. (We were in the same room, she just couldn't get under my feet.) Sometimes she'd get fussy before I was through with the full hour, but mostly it worked pretty well. On some rough days, I'd do it during her nap, which was usually about an hour and a half long. With the increased mobility, Katie was no longer content to remain in a small space with her toys and a snack for an hour. She also cut her nap down to 45 minutes and completely dropped the second one.
Once my foot was healed, and I'll admit I may have given it a little longer than necessary, I not only had a hard time recapturing my enthusiasm, I also had a hard time making it work logistically. I've never been good at doing things at night; I like to work out in the morning before I've eaten and before I'm tired from the day. It also seems to help me wake up and get going, which is nice. At night, I have no ambition. In January, I decided to look into joining a gym, and ended up getting a membership at Lifetime Fitness. Right around the same time, my "coach" for P90X emailed me to let me know it was starting up a new round of the X on the message boards. I was excited again, but ended up derailed because I was still figuring out how to do things at the gym (and how to fit it in).
That's about where I am now. Alongside these struggles are my efforts to be a good wife and mother. I'm not very good at keeping a house or making dinner happen every night. Eating out a lot has been bad for more than my BMI. Our finances are really strained right now, and my lack of kitchen responsibility only makes it worse. I'm working on making meal plans and sticking to them, but it's been difficult. I planned to start again on P90X with the things I learned before in mind (for one, I'm taking yoga with a class instead of trying to do it on my own) and to pick up with my diet again, which I ignored last time. Then I saw something at the gym advertising their 90 day fitness challenge, starting April 9!
Excited, I signed up for that and weighed in last Saturday. I've done pretty well since then, I think. I set a goal of 1500 calories a day, and have only gone over once, by a glass of milk. Mostly I've been surprised how easy it is to hit that mark if I just pay attention to what's going in my mouth. I also started drinking slimquick, to help keep my appetite in check. Yesterday got kind of crazy, and I ended up skipping breakfast and the slimquick to get to yoga on time, and I was off and feeling hungry all day. I snacked way more than I did the rest of the week and went to bed feeling hungry still, so I definitely think that added crutch of an appetite is helping out. And I was exhausted by 4:30 in the afternoon and it fell to Bobby to provide dinner. (Schlotzsky's. One of their medium original sandwiches has 117% of daily sodium. wtf?) Still, I managed to keep my calorie count in check and on target even if they were less nutritious calories than I would have liked.
I've been posting on Twitter with my calorie count and exercise for the previous day for a visual representation of progress. I hate how slow results are from diet and exercise, so I'm hoping being able to look at that will help me. What I really want is a friend doing the same thing to work out with, but I don't see that happening. I had a couple nibbles from a post I made on craigslist (lol) but they both flaked. There was a woman one day in yoga with a little boy almost exactly Katie's age, but she's already in good shape, and I haven't seen her again. So, instead, here's a nice, long, rambling post on Live Journal. Hopefully now all of this will stop spinning around in my head and I can stop thinking how likely it is that I will fail yet again. I know this kind of thing has to be a lifestyle change, but it is so hard to change the easy and comfortable habits.
Today I'm going to look at Kohl's for a decent food processor. One big obstacle to my cooking fresh and healthy food is that I am a very slow and clumsy chopper. A machine to do that for me would make a huge difference.
I'm not only overweight (obese for my height), I'm horribly unfit. And though it hasn't seemed to have adversely affected my health, I know it is only a matter of time, especially if I continue to gain 5 or 10 pounds each year. I can not continue this way. I know most of the decrease in Bobby's and my sex life is due to how I feel about my body, something I'm not at all comfortable discussing with him.
Last year, watching TV a little extra early I caught an infomercial for P90X, a rigorous exercise routine designed to get people in the best shape they've ever been in. I bought it, and watched videos of people making incredible changes on youtube and got myself very pumped up. I was doing well, but 3 weeks into the program, I broke my foot in a feat of clumsiness that surprises even me.
In the time it took me to heal, I weaned Katie and she started walking, two things that dramatically changed the structure and nature of our days. When I started P90X, I did my routines in the morning. I'd give Katie a snack and close her off in an area separate from me. (We were in the same room, she just couldn't get under my feet.) Sometimes she'd get fussy before I was through with the full hour, but mostly it worked pretty well. On some rough days, I'd do it during her nap, which was usually about an hour and a half long. With the increased mobility, Katie was no longer content to remain in a small space with her toys and a snack for an hour. She also cut her nap down to 45 minutes and completely dropped the second one.
Once my foot was healed, and I'll admit I may have given it a little longer than necessary, I not only had a hard time recapturing my enthusiasm, I also had a hard time making it work logistically. I've never been good at doing things at night; I like to work out in the morning before I've eaten and before I'm tired from the day. It also seems to help me wake up and get going, which is nice. At night, I have no ambition. In January, I decided to look into joining a gym, and ended up getting a membership at Lifetime Fitness. Right around the same time, my "coach" for P90X emailed me to let me know it was starting up a new round of the X on the message boards. I was excited again, but ended up derailed because I was still figuring out how to do things at the gym (and how to fit it in).
That's about where I am now. Alongside these struggles are my efforts to be a good wife and mother. I'm not very good at keeping a house or making dinner happen every night. Eating out a lot has been bad for more than my BMI. Our finances are really strained right now, and my lack of kitchen responsibility only makes it worse. I'm working on making meal plans and sticking to them, but it's been difficult. I planned to start again on P90X with the things I learned before in mind (for one, I'm taking yoga with a class instead of trying to do it on my own) and to pick up with my diet again, which I ignored last time. Then I saw something at the gym advertising their 90 day fitness challenge, starting April 9!
Excited, I signed up for that and weighed in last Saturday. I've done pretty well since then, I think. I set a goal of 1500 calories a day, and have only gone over once, by a glass of milk. Mostly I've been surprised how easy it is to hit that mark if I just pay attention to what's going in my mouth. I also started drinking slimquick, to help keep my appetite in check. Yesterday got kind of crazy, and I ended up skipping breakfast and the slimquick to get to yoga on time, and I was off and feeling hungry all day. I snacked way more than I did the rest of the week and went to bed feeling hungry still, so I definitely think that added crutch of an appetite is helping out. And I was exhausted by 4:30 in the afternoon and it fell to Bobby to provide dinner. (Schlotzsky's. One of their medium original sandwiches has 117% of daily sodium. wtf?) Still, I managed to keep my calorie count in check and on target even if they were less nutritious calories than I would have liked.
I've been posting on Twitter with my calorie count and exercise for the previous day for a visual representation of progress. I hate how slow results are from diet and exercise, so I'm hoping being able to look at that will help me. What I really want is a friend doing the same thing to work out with, but I don't see that happening. I had a couple nibbles from a post I made on craigslist (lol) but they both flaked. There was a woman one day in yoga with a little boy almost exactly Katie's age, but she's already in good shape, and I haven't seen her again. So, instead, here's a nice, long, rambling post on Live Journal. Hopefully now all of this will stop spinning around in my head and I can stop thinking how likely it is that I will fail yet again. I know this kind of thing has to be a lifestyle change, but it is so hard to change the easy and comfortable habits.
Today I'm going to look at Kohl's for a decent food processor. One big obstacle to my cooking fresh and healthy food is that I am a very slow and clumsy chopper. A machine to do that for me would make a huge difference.